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Visual Velcro, Cont. Originally, these pilot multimedia tours were free of charge and focused specifically on the permanent collection; now they accompany special exhibitions as well and are offered for a fee. While price is surely a barrier and people hesitate to sign on, not knowing what they will be getting, those who actually take the tours give them enthusiastic reviews.
Among the findings from a recent study conducted during a “Frida Kahlo” exhibition: - Visitors looked longer, noticed detail, understood more.
- Audio commentary “guides your eyes” around the painting.
- Majority felt the guide encouraged them to spend longer in the exhibition.12
In this study, the time-honored wall label was criticized as a negative example: “The plaques by the side of paintings can be a bit distracting; with these [multimedia tours] you can look and listen.” Similarly, in a recent Whitney Museum study, a visitor testified as to how a simpler, non-multimedia audio tour served to focus her attention on the specifics of an artwork:
Well, you have a tendency, your eyes have a tendency to see everything in the room, so your eyes can be easily distracted by something else that you see, rather than, when you’re forced to listen to something, you’re actually looking at every detail in the painting or sculpture rather than, you know, glancing over things and ignoring them or forgetting them.13
In a tracking and timing study conducted at the Detroit Institute of Arts, museum curators, administrators and staff were asked how long they hoped visitors would spend in a given exhibition. Then, to add a dose of sobriety, they were asked how long they expected visitors to spend.14 The results are show in Figure 1.
Speaking of time commitments, initial research suggests very different profiles for those who take standard audio tours and those who choose instead to access the same audio commentaries just in time on their cell phones. Older, veteran museum-goers who swear by audio guides choose them because the tours offer a customized “bubble” experience that will saturate them with sound and insight for 45 minutes or more and ensure they get full value from their exhibition investment. Cell phone tour users, on the other hand, seem to want to preserve their independence: they are more comfortable with an à la carte, “cafeteria-style” alternative, where they can call up and get on-demand doses of information about specific objects—at this point, without cost. No commitment required: They get to shape their experience, and their information flows, as they go.
So what does the future hold in store for the handheld tour? Millions of dollars have been spent on the quest for the holy grail of Wi-Fi “anytime, anywhere” push access, just so visitors do not have to use onscreen menus or enter object numbers to trigger the playback of multimedia content. It now appears certain that PDAs, which once enjoyed an aura of manifest destiny as the next museum interpretive device, are not long for this world—destined instead to give way to iPods, smartphones and, as of June 2007, that new synthesis, the iPhone. So the watchword in planning would be “Design for Experience, Not for Hardware.”15
The surest way to hew true to that adage is to develop content that is hardware-independent, and not beholden to any one vendor or particular technology. In fact, the more that a museum’s content obeys Web standards, the more likely it will play on visitors’ own constantly evolving hardware, relieving museums of the headache of stocking, sustaining or leasing a fleet of aging players for their visitors.
What people really need, to use Second Story Interactive Studios cofounder Brad Johnson’s term, is “on-demand variable mediation,” not a single choice-point when they enter the museum—to rent an audio tour or not—but rather a series of available resources all along their route.16
Fixed-Position Gallery Interactives
While handhelds offer the promise of mobility, most museum visitors do not want to walk through a museum with a custom tour or a cell phone held to their ear. For these other visitors, another class of interpretive technology—smart tables and other fixed-position gallery interactives—offers many benefits.
Smart tables first saw public use in MoMA’s 1999 “Un-Private House” exhibition. Flavia Sparacino of the MIT Media Lab worked with MoMA and Cambridge-based NearLife to develop a circular sit-down table within the exhibition space. When users moved a coaster bearing the image of one of the project houses to their “place setting” at the table, its RFID tag was read, identifying the project and triggering a projection of floor plans or related video commentaries on the table in front of them; these projections could in turn be sent to the lazy susan at the table’s center, which was then rotated for others to share.17
A simpler, far more off-the-shelf implementation of a smart table idea took place in SFMOMA’s 2001 exhibition “Points of Departure: Connecting with Contemporary Art.”18 Basically upturned touch screen kiosks in a piece of blond wood furniture that blended with the gallery, these tables aimed to augment static wall texts with living, breathing personalities that connected visitors just in time with artists and curators, and, through them, with distinctive perspectives concerning the art on display.
The tables’ content comprised three levels, corresponding to three sets of voices and kinds of questions, shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
| Level | Speakers/Agents | Questions | | 1 | Curator Videos | Why would anyone make this?What is it doing in this big important building? | | 2 | Artist Videos | Why did I make this? How did I make this? | | 3 | Visitor Activity | What would you be doing if you made this? | Each smart table was tailored to offer a 3–5 minute experience for the average visitor—though they contained about 20 minutes of content if all levels were fully explored.19 They only treated the artworks visible in their immediate vicinity; to hear about artworks in other parts of the exhibition, you had to use the smart tables in those zones. The presence of actual curators and a lightness and variety of tone provided a welcome departure from the faceless, anonymous museum voice so common to museum wall texts. Curatorial commentary was ruthlessly pruned to sound-byte length, enabling the editing of multiple perspectives into each table. The artist videos were much appreciated by the visitors, as were the activities that gave visitors the chance to try out the artistic concepts.
Since that time, other museums such as the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) and the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms in London have deployed far more technologically ambitious interactive tables, to serve as a catalyst for group or collective experience. The IMA’s “etx Perceptable,” situated in what was then called its “X-Room,” allowed visitors to place one of three paddle-like tools over a changing array of artworks projected on a tabletop to trigger either associated artworks, interpretive information or maps displaying the artwork’s location.
The Churchill Museum’s “Lifeline Table” creates a 19-foot-long visual interface to a database of documents, photos, journals and letters that chronicle Winston Churchill’s 90-year life. Certain dates, often unknown in advance to users, trigger rewards or “Easter eggs,” light and sound animations that spread across the table.
Tables of this scale dominate the gallery and so far have been almost exclusively deployed in history museums. It is unclear as of this writing how and when they might be adapted to an art museum setting.20
Other types of digital interactives that have worked remarkably well in art museum settings include the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s interactive scroll and ceramic bowl facsimiles, which offer visitors a “kinaesthetic” experience of Japanese artifacts, and the Cleveland Museum of Art’s wall-mounted, touch-screen exploration of the hidden layers of its early Picasso painting, La Vie.
Diversifying the Menu:
Learning Lounges and InfoCafés
Integrating the benefits of just-in-time context provided by educational technologies within the social spaces of the museum leads to what may be the next frontier: the design of interactive spaces where both analog and digital resources are available to enhance visitor experience.
At SFMOMA we have integrated “Learning Lounges” in two exhibitions since 2006. Visitor observation, surveys and interviews reliably indicate that these learning spaces work: They make the whole exhibition more meaningful. While exploring an exhibition, many cognitive threads open up; a learning lounge gives visitors the opportunity to reflect and review, to augment their emergent understandings while still in an art space, before they have to resume the hectic pace of the outside world. This is the point of maximum “wanting to know”—and the opportunity to hook the artworks into the fabric of viewers’ lives.
Interestingly SFMOMA’s research shows that use of analog resources trumps the digital in these hybrid lounges. People are far more likely to watch the artist video and read the illustrated FAQs on the walls than to sit down at a computer kiosk. Years of museum-going and a society that processes knowledge through video apparently predispose people to prioritize certain forms of literacy. Visitors who do sit down at the computers often spend a long time there and rate them highly, but others say the computers remind them too much of work and require too much effort. Compared to straight linear video where all the decisions have been made, they do require effort. You must choose and choose again—and navigationally speaking, the kiosks are a bit of an unknown quantity. (That said, when no dedicated artist video exists, kiosk usage goes up considerably.)
I have a theory—which has not yet been put to the test—that something akin to the old Marshall McLuhan distinction between hot and cool media is at play here.21 Art is hot and wall text and graphics are hot—they are familiar, almost handmade. But the glass pane of flat screen computer displays is cool. It speaks of a world quite remote from the handmade warmth in the galleries. So one can understand why some visitors—especially older ones—who come to the art museum to restore their souls by contact with something handmade and personal would shun technologies in this liminal zone. They might go home and check out the same program on the Web, but that is after they have left this place of refuge. As for the artist video, it may be playing on a similar flat screen, but it is made hot by the presence of the artist—the one who made all the objects you have just seen.
Video, text, graphics and seating all come together at Paris’s new Musée du Quai Branly. There, a freestanding, leather-covered interpretive wall snakes like a spine through the heart of the permanent collection galleries, blending analog and digital resources with raised, texture-mapped graphics and commentaries in Braille for the visually impaired.
In London, Tate Modern routinely posts exhibition-related wall graphics—and sometimes videos—to the wall of its upstairs café. The museum recently collaborated with Ab Rogers Design to develop a “Learning Zone” on the fifth-floor landing adjacent to the permanent collection galleries. The zone’s bright red, high-impact plastic furnishings serve as a magnet for teen and 20-something audiences, who go there to play free association games with artworks, brief themselves on artists and movements through witty multimedia kiosks and catch a revolving selection of video screenings. Informality and participation are key here: heavy-handed, musty pedagogy has been banned, and visitor viewpoints are actively solicited via note cards, then filtered and posted in a set of hanging red bulletin board frames.
Learning lounges are inherently social spaces. Their use is not restricted to an individual, as audio tours often are. Moreover, they enable another behavior: People use not just one or two interpretive resources but four, five or six—and the more they use, the more highly they rate the exhibition, and the more meaningful they say the art is for them.22 There is clearly no single magic bullet. People are inherently diverse in their learning styles, generational inclinations, entrance narratives and comfort levels with the objects we present—but zones like these that combine analog and digital resources help to weave a cognitive-emotive tapestry around the artworks that invites and structures engaged inquiry. Through such environments we welcome and meet our visitors where they are.
Adding the Human Element
While we are on the topic of social learning environments, let us not forget that museums have another interpretive asset in the galleries beyond object labels, wall texts, audio, video and computers: PEOPLE! Curators, museum educators, docents and animators of various stripes all serve as the ultimate analog interactive device: context-sensitive, responsive to visitor questions and observations in real time, with built-in Artificial Intelligence (AI)—minus the “A.” The major drawback is that these in-person tours, even if offered several times a day, do not reach the majority of visitors.
More and more museums are experimenting with either replacing or supplementing their in-gallery security personnel with gallery attendants who know something about art and are encouraged to respond to visitor questions and converse with them about the works, all the while keeping their eyes on the objects. This extension of the museum guard’s vocation beyond simple asset protection holds great promise, as gallery attendants are typically the only museum staff with whom our visitors come into contact when they are looking at art. Institutions ranging from the Phillips Collection to Tate, the Walker Art Center and the San Jose Museum of Art have seen fit to hire art students or artists to work in their galleries. The Guggenheim has adopted a hybrid solution, employing gallery guides to converse casually with visitors about the art even while they retain their traditional guard staff.23 At SITE Santa Fe, a contemporary art space in New Mexico, the gallery attendants have been trained in Visual Thinking Strategies so they may facilitate visitors’ interactions with a changing array of cutting-edge, contemporary art.24
Conclusion
Interpretive practice has clearly evolved and diversified over the past ten years to include an array of in-museum digital devices, both mobile and fixed. Yet none of these has supplanted those time-honored staples of gallery interpretation: wall texts, object labels and live tours. Surveys show that analog resources are still, along with linear film and video, the most frequently utilized interpretive resources in our museums—even if they are not necessarily the most highly rated!25 The discrepancy between visitor use patterns and satisfaction ratings is clear indication that a “teachable moment” is at hand. Research shows that visitor experiences are largely shaped by visitor expectations;26 it follows that museums themselves must alter visitor expectations by actively promoting innovative interpretive resources as an essential part of the museum experience. The phenomenon may be partly generational: As we transition from a paper-centric generation to one of digital natives, the printed word may lose some of its primacy, and technology use will feel more natural. But as of this writing, a hybrid palette of complementary resources—both analog and digital—seems to offer the best chance of giving our visitors a cognitive scaffolding that hones their confidence and builds their capacity to experience even the most unfamiliar and challenging art.
Peter Samis is associate curator of interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This article was adapted from The Digital Museum: A Think Guide.
Visual Velcro Footnotes 
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